Free Thing of the Week: Naviar Records’ Haiku 11

For the past couple of years, Naviar Records have been exploring the link between music and Japanese poetry in a monst interesting way. At biweekly intervals, Naviar posts a “competition” on their blog, open to anyone who visits their webpage. Sometimes this is a haiku challenge, in which people write music to an assigned poem, but their newest competition has branched into rengaku, in which artists finish each other’s work.

The results of the haiku challenge become the basis of their Haiku audio series. The music runs the gamut from quiet, South and East Asian-influenced drone music to rather more industrial electronica sounds. The results are always interesting and, in the spirit of cooperative creation, the music is always released with a Creative Commons license.

Naviar has now released their eleventh volume of this poetry-inspired music. Haiku 11 gathers ten music tracks together with ten poems, all of which are listed on Naviar’s Bandcamp page. This edition features primarily musical artists who have never appeared before in the series.